Wystan Curnow
Wystan had just come to town
from the Creeley conference. In 1993, he had spent
a semester in Buffalo as a Poetics Program Fellow (along
with Arkadii Dragomochenko, Eric Mottram, and Ernesto Livon-Grosman).
I asked him about going to graduate school at Penn, where he
was the first New Zealander to get a PhD in English in the U.S.(mp4, 45 seconds, 5.8 mb)

Leevi Lehto
Leevi and I were
on the train from Helsinki to Turku (the old capital city) for
the launch, at the annual Turku book fair, of my
Finnish book, Runouden puolustus. Esseit ja runoja kahdelta vuosituhannelta (A Defence of Poetry. Essays and Poems From Two Millennia.
So I asked Leevi — "What was the first Finnish poem?"(mp4, 1
min. 6
secs, 8 mb)

Robert Grenier
Bob, Mimi Gross, and I met at
Pecan's, in Tribeca, just before taping Close Listening at WPS1's
Clocktower studio on Leonard Street. We walked across the street
and Bob sat on the stoop and talked about his visit to New York.(mp4, 25 seconds, 4 mb)

James Sherry
James moved to his loft on the Bowery (at Houston) about 30
years ago. At the time, it was still skid row. Roof
books and Segue Distributing were run out of the space
and from time to time we had readings there too. And our first
local talk series, "New York Talks," which I curated
in 1984.(mp4, 31 seconds, 5.1 mb)

Johanna Drucker
Johanna, Susan, and I were on a Chelsea art walk. When she is at home in Charlottesville,
Johanna will sometimes spend hundreds of hours typesetting and
printing a book. The results are stunning but it's sometimes
hard to take in how labor intensive the work is. (mp4, 36 seconds, 5.9 mb)